Connecting Azure DevOps with Lifecycle Services for Release piplelines

Manage the lifecycle of your application starting from requirement capturing to delivery to Manage your Application's lifecycle in Cloud using Azure DevOps. Microsoft announced the release of a new Azure DevOps Task And with the help of this post by Business Application MVP, Munib Ahmed, I sat down and ran through the setup a couple of days ago. This new feature is very quick and easy to set up, and is something everyone should adopt sooner than later. It shaves off the time spent downloading the complete build artifact somewhere and then uploading it to the Dynamics Lifecycle Services Project Asset Library. After a successful build of the full application, you will get the package automatically "released" and uploaded to the asset library.

We expect more "tasks" to be added, allowing us to setup a release pipeline that also let us automatically install a successful build on a designated target environment. So getting this setup now, and have the connection working, will set the stage for adding the next features as they are announced.

Here are some of the requirements and considerations while you set this up:

You need to register an Azure Application of type Native (public, multi-tenant). While it is said you can use the preview experience to register the app in the Azure Portal, I had to use the "non-preview" experience, to ensure I got a correct Native Azure app registration, and not a Web app. While you can add the necessary permissions setup (user_impersonation), you need to run the admin consent for the permissions to work.

The connection also requires user credentials as part of the setup. This should not be just any user if you think about it. You don't want the connection to break just because the password was changed, or the user was disabled. Also, multi-factor (or two-factor) authentication will not work here. So you might want to create yourself a dedicated user for this connection. The user does not need any licenses, just a normal cloud user you have set up and logged on with at least once.

If you already have a successful build ready, go ahead and set up the release pipeline and run it once to see it succeed - or fail. If it fails while trying to connect, it could be one of the following errors:

·         AADSTS65001: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application with ID '***' named 'NAME_OF_APP'. Send an interactive authorization requests for this user and resource.

Here you have not successfully run the admin consent. Someone with proper permissions needs to run the "Grant permissions" in the Azure Portal.

·         AADSTS50076: Due to a configuration change made by your administrator, or because you moved to a new location, you must use multi-factor authentication to access.

This is most likely because the user credentials used on the connection is secured with multi-factor authentication. Either use a different account without MFA or disable it. Most likely it is on for the account for a reason.

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